Radar systems play an important role in intelligent transport solutions and the development of autonomous vehicles. In some cases, the accuracy of these systems may increase with an increase in the number of radar sensors provided in a vehicle. Radar sensors may be spread along the exterior of a vehicle, for example a truck or a car, to provide an object detection coverage spanning 360 degrees. By doing so the vehicle may have a better picture of its surroundings compared to an implementation of fewer sensors. Each sensor may provide a coverage spanning only a fraction of a 360 degree coverage of the area surrounding the vehicle. In some cases, this may be due to the body of the vehicle blocking at least part of the coverage area of a sensor.
The processing of radar signals takes a not insignificant amount of processing power and thus deploying multiple radar sensor necessarily increases the cost of a radar system due to the increase processing power requirement. One option may be to provide centralized processing of the radar data from the sensors. Additionally, it may be desired to miniaturize sensors such that they can fit unobtrusively in the vehicle itself, for example, compared to the traditional locations of existing radar sensors, proposed mounting locations (inside the doors for example) may be space limited. As a consequence the available cooling area of the sensors is reducing and the heat generated inside the sensor becomes a problem. With the introduction of more sensors, the price per sensor starts to impact on the affordability of a radar system.